Down By The Riverside

Dilip DSouza

Published in Sunday Mid-Day, September 26

It was just 10 minutes, if that, but it was still one of the more
unsettling 10 minute stretches I've had in recent times. I walked up to a
second floor flat near Churchgate to watch a bit of video, shot just a
couple of days earlier. It shook and jerked and a fair fraction of the
footage was as amateur efforts often are of the floor and the sky.

But those things hardly mattered. The video also showed a number of people
holding hands, singing songs, shouting slogans. Later, it showed a number
of these same people being arrested. About the only unusual thing was that
they were standing, chest deep, in water.

Perhaps I don't need to tell you what this was about, but I will anyway.
This little clip was shot on the banks, if that word still applies, of the
Narmada River, not far from the Sardar Sarovar Dam. Nearly unknown to much
of this city, a drama has been unfolding in tumbledown huts on that stretch
of the Narmada. In a string of villages with names like Domkhedi, Sikka,
Pipalchop and Bharad, hundreds of men and women have spent the last several
days standing in water. The water has been rising through those days, into
their homes and around their bodies. In the video, as I said, it was at
chest level. Reports after it was shot say the water was up to their chins.

The water is rising because of that dam and because of heavy rains upriver.
The people are standing in it because of that dam and because they have not
been adequately, or fairly, treated by its builders. They are standing in
it because they want to tell you what that dam is doing to their homes and
lives. Because they are upset at being forced from their homes. As you
might be, perhaps, if you were forced from your home.

By now in this article, I know I have lost a lot of you and risk losing the
rest. It is an unremarkable feature of the urban Indian as the 20th Century
winds down; we don't really want to know what is happening to people
elsewhere.

In fact, when it is the people along the Narmada, we are even faintly
irritated. We've had enough of that whole issue and that Medha Patkar woman
and her Narmada Bachao Andolan, those publicity-seekers! They are trying to
take us back to the Dark Ages when we had no lights and roads. It's time
they gave up their silly struggle and learned to sacrifice for the nation's
progress. After all, someone has to sacrifice, right? Right. Besides, they
are anti-nationals, funded by foreigners.

Because I have heard those things said. I write this. I write to ask a few
simple questions; what publicity-seekers would spend hours, that turn to
days, standing in water? Watching the water rise about their bodies? What
kind of publicity do they seek, have they found, if the overwhelming
majority in our largest city does not even know this is happening a few
hundred kilometres away? Where is this foreign funding when these people
wear basic cotton clothes, when they struggle to hold on to ramshackle huts
only because those were their homes?

I write this to ask some not-so-simple questions too: What will it take to
take these people seriously? To know that they are not playing some
foreign-funded game, but are fighting a deadly serious fight for their
lives, for a say in their lives? Your life is not a game. Nor is mine. Why
is it so hard to accept that people in the Narmada Valley are just like us?

And of course, that's the truth right there. Those poor fools standing in
water are really trying to tell us this. that they are Indians just like
us. Citizens just like us. People just like us.

So grant them that, if only for the time it takes you to read this article.
You might just see their concerns as they see them.

One: If these people are to lose their homes and land to a dam, they want
to be compensated for their sacrifice. Governments make promises about such
compensation, no doubt. But these days, such people prefer to look instead
at the record of such compensation that governments have built since
independence. It is not a pretty record.

Two: If our 52 years tells them that they will suffer as a result of this
dam, they want a say in whether the dam is built at all. After all, we are
not talking here about one or two eccentric holdouts. This is about tens,
hundreds, of thousands of people. Over our 52 years, over all our dams,
this is about millions.

Three: Since this is about millions of people turned destitute, these
fellows standing in the water want us to think about what we mean by
development. None of them, let's be sure, want us to return to being cave
men. But neither do they want, any more, the form of development we have
had. So far, it has meant dams on their lands, submerging their homes,
ignoring their needs, all so that you and I can have electricity and water
in our far-off city flats. Near a dam on the Narmada in MP, I once walked
through a village that was utterly dark. But its residents could see the
lights on the dam, in towns nearby. Now that is the skewed way we have
chosen to develop. Such people are saying while they stand in that water,
enough. Enough of this kind of development.

Four: Perhaps above all, this is about people asserting that they will not
be told any more what's good for them. They want to be able to decide for
themselves. They want the freedom to pronounce, as we city-dwellers do so
easily, that some people must sacrifice for the good of the nation. Some
other people, of course. For they are tired of being those sacrificing
people. What's more, they know now that the good of the nation must mean
their good too. Or it means nothing.

Those are the reasons they are standing in water, there on the banks of the
swollen Narmada. While they do so, you might give them a thought. They are,
please don't doubt it, people just like you.